Update on Sugarbeet refinery (new update 4/23/12)

Stubbygda,

Your work on this structure is first class. Museum quality at is best.

Alan Graziano

Wow! Totally awesome! Good job.

Robert E.

Great job love the brickwork color and the interior details. happy Railroading!!!!-Don klose

Great Googley Moogley!  That is FANTASTIC!  Having spent almost all of my adult life in various manufacturing facilities... your inside detailing has a very industrial feel. Very nice.

Holy cow!! Somebody ELSE is building a sugarbeet factory??  And I thought mine was off the wall.  I kitbashed my six story main building from several Korber "Joe's Pickle Factory" kits, plus scratchbuilt "highline" and flume, sugar silos (the classic symbol for Great Western sugar factories), scratchbuilt smoke stack, kitbashed water tower,  and am just getting ready to scratchbuild a beet dump with truck ramps to load the cars to run in to the high line, which will finish this complex.  I built mine from photos taken of three of the GW plants up I-76 out of Denver, two of them in ruins, but I did not get inside, and I build too many structures to spend time on interiors.  I suspected some of the supporting structures had been torn down.  What are you using for O scale sugar beets?  I saw an article listing some oddball seed you could use to model HO ones...but O?  Puffed wheat crossed my mind, but that would invite assorted unwanted critters up onto the layout.  Several articles have been written on HO sugar factories, but another in O scale is surprising (at least, to me...hope you do an article for a mag on that effort).

Yours is obviously one of the larger complexes, like at Longmont?, but they varied in style and size, as least for GW.  I referred to the several books on the GW RR and to the HO articles. If you got inside and crawled all over one, as it looks like, fantastic!!  I wanta see pictures when this is all done.

hey guys thanks for the nice comments....

coloradohirailer:  yea, ya dont see too many o scale sugarbeet refineries, but more ho scale ones....i think maybe because of the scale of the real refineries and bins, they are really huge, and maybe folks are tired of them from the ho days??  i find them very interesting, i now know more than i ever thought i would about sugarbeet refining.  there are some great resources online about them....most of the equipment i made came from the enginnering books on sugarbeet refining from the early 1900s, they have great diagrams and explanations of the equipment and process.  the main refinery i chose was located in Utah, but i also studied the colorado versions, i am kinda blending them all together to get something that works for me. 

Anyway, for the beets themselves i used safflower seeds..these have been used for ho models but are better suited to o scale....they are prettty close to the scale size of the sugarbeets (1/4" or about a foot long).....you can use different paint colors on them to depict dirty, sorta clean, and clean beets ready for the cutter....i would love to see some pics of your sugarbeet stuff...

here is a car load i made with the safflower seeds posing as sugarbeets

Fabulous! And that interior machinery leaves me speechless. I would also like to know what you're using for the brick walls? Also, did you have such a great eye/measurement technique that you cut those window openings and they just fit in perfectly or did you figure another way to do that? I've never been good with masonite/brick window openings since just a millimeter off and space/light shows through. Thanks. 

Jerrman

for brick:

i am using the rusty stump product L1502, o scale lightly aged brick wall sheets, adhesive backed, although i add white glue for small strips or pieces, these are laser cut brick on resin coated cardstock.   i cant say enough good stuff about this product.  i used light weight spackling compound for mortar.  its thin enough to make almost perfect corners but the resin coating is tough enough to cut very thin strips...all the trim pieces of brick i cut from the sheets, these are not special pieces...i am still a newbie this being only the 3rd building i have done but i have used ameritown kit with brick, dpm brick panels, couple of different styrene sheet brick and korber brick building and this was the best looking and easiest to paint and mortar i have used..since the brick are laser cut they have very clean lines...

as far as the windows:

basically i needed a reliable way to do this cause i have so many to do across the 4 buildings, so built a styrene frame around the window out of strip, i used 1/4 " cause i had some and it worked for my diminsions but it could be any size, the key is ya build around the assembled window taking advantage of the edge of the strip so it fits perfectly....then i cut that into the wall...since the wall will be covered this is a much less crucial cut..i leave the acetate on the window overlapping the frame, i glue this to the backside of the outer wall, then i glue an inner wall "sandwiching" the window between the two....it is more complicated to describe than to do....

here is a frame built around a window

here are the back wall components before i assembled them, outer wall with a frame cut in, inner wall, and column relief for outside...

Thanks for the info on safflower seeds!!  I have already gone out to my foodie friends asking where to track some down.  I have some kitbashed Great Western RR beet gons waiting for loads. I noticed your heading photo was a good photo of a one track "high line" and dumped beets.  My best source was Jessen's "Railroads of Northern Colorado", better than the GW books, for factory detail photos, and I can just wish I had had that engineering information you had to work from, and better photos,  especially for highline and flume.  I searched GW on line and found out

they got "enronned", were a successful cash rich company that was sucked dry by

an expansion mad manager, but I did not find much technical and did not broaden

my search into beet sugar processing in general

If I get my 35mm photos digitized, and I figure out how to do it, I should get some

up on here.  Another brick structure I kitbashed from several Korber kits is a

Colorado brewery (fictional).  It isn't tiny, either, with multiple structures.  Neither looks as good as yours with that brick material you are using.

Man oh man, I just stumbled on this thread, what a great looking factory you are coming up with.  Your work is superb and I really like the way you've done your brick and the interior is simply outstanding.  Thanks for sharing this with us.  I really like what you've done so far and I'm really looking forward to what you will come up with for the rest of that factory.  Really nice work.

If you don't mind my asking, who made the gondola that you have the picture of?  I've never seen safflower seeds before, where do you find them.  They really seem to be a good match for sugar beets.

Excellent work!  Thanks for posting.

Dave

Okay...Thanks!! My search of health food stores turned up no safflower seeds, BUT I will sure pursue the big box home stores for bird feeder safflower seeds.  I have been looking for drop bottom and composite gons, have hoppers in C&S and D&SL, doubt if any of the mfrs. have gons in those roadnames, but several years ago I had kitbashed several beet gons from Weaver kits for some specialty gon, and I added the high sides that the Great Western also used on their cars.  Those car are packed away, awaiting the completion of this complex, and I need to find them.

Thanks Stubbygda.  I'm going to see if I can find a couple.  If I'm not mistaken, I believe that Intermountain (before Atlas bought them) made the gons in kit form.  Would it be possible to convert those to 3 rail?

I'm putting my pathetic tools away.

Holy Moly . . . . . 

Is there a website to see?

Eliot

WOW!!!!!  Very nice work.Keep the progress pictures coming.

j motts: i have no idea about the conversion to 3 rail but ya might try a separate post on that, i am sure someone on here knows!!

scrapiron scher: no web site, maybe one day if i ever get enough of my layout going, right now only have about 95% of the track done and 3 buildings (only one of those planted)!!  hey don't kid me about your tools i have seen lots of pics of your outstanding  layout and work, but thanks for the kind words!!

Very very good. The machinery is awesome.

i updated this post thinking that it would repost it with updates but it just updates it so i am replying here to get it to post...i added the update at the begining of the thread

That is some beautiful work. 

Awesome job !

Stubby, this is such nice work your doing. I appreciate scratch building since that's also what I do for my structure needs. Your window technique is a good repeatable method especially having so many to do. I too like Rusty's scratch building supplies, an excellent resource.

I especially admire people who show individual creativity rather than looking to buy everything possible. You will end up having something that no one else has on there layout instead of it looking the same as all the rest do.

This is a great project!

Bob

Just wonderful, a great job and the end result will be beautiful!

Thanks for posting.

Ssooooooooooo beautiful! Spectacular. The patina of the brick is perfect, esp. with the muted, subdued green of the trim and windows - really good taste throughout.

Frank

thanks again guys for the encouraging words...only the folks on this forum really appreciate the time and work that goes into some of these structures!!  well on to the main refinery building and warehouse....i cant wait to get them done so i can get them on the layout and finish the area around them, thats when all the work really comes together!!

Well, I'm not sure how I missed this.

Beautiful work!